Long transients often appear in the presence of a “small” (close to zero) parameter in the model [1]}. One of the main challenges of identifying long transients is identifying such a small parameter, which may be a function of the biologically reasonable parameters, and thus may not be easily interpretable. For example, in ghost attractors, this small parameter is the difference between a bifurcation parameter and its bifurcation value [1]}. While varying the parameter past such bifurcation leads to the destruction of an attractor, small differences the transient dynamics will resemble the attractor. In crawl-by attractors, the small parameter is determined by the degree to which the trajectory of the system is parallel to the stable manifold of a saddle node equilibrium at a given time [1]}. In this case the system will behave similarly to such a stable manifold for a prolonged period of time before the unstable part of the trajectory leads to a change in the system behavior.
